Amy Westervelt

A PR exec and lawyer, Berman is best known for his "win ugly or lose pretty" approach to politics. While a lot of PR execs shy away from overt campaigns or playing dirty, Berman has built his reputation on such tactics, starting with the tobacco industry in the 1990s and now including the food and beverage industry, oil and gas, chemical companies, plastic manufacturers, and anyone who hates unions. He runs a network of front groups and think tanks funded by industry groups, companies, and rightwing foundations.

In 2014, a tape of Berman at an energy industry conference was leaked to The New York Times. In his talk, he detailed his strategy, not only for that industry, but in general.

"So we start out with negative public opinion, which is most important to at least be aware that if you go out and you poll, this is what you find. So that can be depressing at one level. But let me tell you something data people don't often think about it. The whole theory 
here that I can't get into; but it's the difference between people having a public opinion and people making a public judgment; when people come to a so-called public judgment. Public opinion is, "I'm a Democrat, or, I'm a Republican, and I like people who have a 'D' or 'R' 
after their names." That's the public opinion about the Democrats or the Republicans. Public judgment is when the public decides that they want to vote for somebody or not vote for somebody even across party lines based on some facts. Facts are most important, and public judgment goes deeper than public opinion. When you achieve public judgment about something, especially something that you are not in favor of: you're willing to tax it, you're willing to ban it, you're willing to put warnings on something. That's when you get public judgment, and the political process won't go that far until there is public judgment about something.”

In 1987, Rick Berman founded Berman and Company, a full-service research and communications firm, with seed funding from its anchor client, Philip Morris. Prior to that Berman  was employed as an Executive Vice President for Pillsbury, labor attorney for Bethlehem Steel and The Dana Corporation, as well as Director of Labor Law for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In 2007, a 60 Minutes special on Berman 

 a nickname that's stuck over the years. 

Berman's forte is astroturfing. He runs a wide range of front groups, including the Center for Consumer Freedom, the Center for Union Facts, Employment Policies Institute Foundation, Center for Organizational Research and Education, and campaigns like Big Green Radicals (against environmental organizations) and Teachers Unions Exposed.

Berman Documents

Mad Men

Rick Berman: "Dr. Evil"

[00:00:00] Dr Little, have any cancer causing agents been identified and cigarets. No, none. Whatever, either in cigarets or in any product of smoking as such. What are the conclusions reached by your organization that there is need for much more research over a wide area? And, in my opinion, to single out smoking as a causal agent is on the evidence to date completely unjustified.

[00:00:30] In 1952, Dr Richard Dahl published a groundbreaking study in the UK. It linked smoking to lung cancer. Here he is much later in life talking about those early days of research and how that research was received.

[00:00:48] The media were, of course, against us for a long time, and whenever they announced a new observation on the harmful effects of smoking is like is not there, in demand announced it would be smoking a cigaret, or they would have someone else get up through tobacco industry and say, Well, it is controversial. Somebody else doesn't believe it.

[00:01:10] The following year in the US, Dr Ernst Winder showed another devastating link between tobacco and cancer. Winder and his team painted tobacco tars from cigaret smoke onto the backs of mice. 44 percent of the lab animals developed malignant tumors,

[00:01:28] according to this repeated nationwide survey. More doctors smoke camels than any other cigaret, and

[00:01:34] there was me thinking the medical establishment was anti-cancer. It would take nearly 20 years before those sorts of ads were banned. But the tobacco industries campaign to discredit the science on smoking and cancer showed no signs of stopping. In a lot of ways, this is a well-known story. Plenty of folks have seen the insider.

[00:01:58] You go public and 30 million people hear what you got to say. Nothing. I mean, nothing will ever be the same again. Now, the work we did here is confidential, not for public scrutiny anymore than on one's family matters. We're very serious about protecting our interests.

[00:02:20] And some know about the shady scientists who work for tobacco and went on to work for the oil industry thanks to the work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway and their book The Merchants of Doubt.

[00:02:32] The important thing that we thought we had discovered in our research about thought we thought people needed to understand was that actually the roots of this story are not found in the fossil fuel industry. There, found in the tobacco industry. And in fact, there was there is a direct connection between climate change denial and the denial of the harms of tobacco in the in the actual person of this man, Fredrick Sykes, who was the founding director of the George C. Marshall Institute but also worked for six years as the director of biomedical research for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

[00:03:04] But we're going to explore a lesser known side of the story today. The PR guy who developed the industry's spin on science, a rather unassuming dude who wore navy suits and tiny little specks and would seem right at home speaking at the weekly Rotary Club meeting in Columbus, Ohio. The silent but deadly. John Hill, even his name is sort of forgettable, but his impact was decidedly not. Welcome back to Rechte The Story of Disinformation, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and science right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt, today's trick: science denial.

[00:03:47] This is Dan Zegart. I have been for most of my life. Investigative reporter and I. I wrote a book called Civil Warriors Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry.

[00:04:00] After Civil Warriors, Zegart kept researching tobacco's efforts to sell the American public on their products. One name kept coming up. You guessed it John W. Hill.

[00:04:13] When I was researching my my book, a bunch of documents were released by actually by congressmen that dealt with Helen Norton's original corporate building of the denial machine that became so well known, which started in 1954.

[00:04:35] Hill & Knowlton is the firm John Hill ran with his partner Don Knowlton. But Hill wasn't always in PR. John Hill was born on a farm in Indiana in 1890. His grandfather had been very wealthy, but his father lost all the family's money in a series of business deals gone wrong and hell would spend the rest of his life chasing the company and approval of rich men. You could say he had sugar daddy issues like a lot of our other PR guys. He started his career as a journalist before he turned to the dark side. But unlike the others, he seems to have been fairly good at it. Hill was a financial and business reporter for 17 years before he got into the PR game. He even started a couple of newspapers himself. Although he struggled to keep them afloat, some things never change.

[00:05:37] In 1920, in Ohio, he took his first step into the PR world when he was hired to create a newsletter for Cleveland's Union Trust Co., a bank. By this time, he was the financial editor of a steel industry trade magazine. Because Ohio, these jobs put him in regular contact with executives around town, and eventually Hill saw a niche he could fill. Helping companies explain themselves to reporters didn't get the steel industry. In other words, they didn't think capitalism was frickin awesome. Hill opened up his own firm in 1927 with Union Trust and Otis Steel as his first clients. Because Hill was well-liked by local executives, word spread fast, and within a couple of months he was doing PR for United alloy Steel Republic Steel and Standard Oil of Ohio. In 1953, Hill was tapped to help another industry struggling to maintain a good relationship with the public tobacco. Here's Danziger again, reading from a chapter of his as yet unpublished but copyrighted book Addiction Inc..

[00:06:49] John W. Hill, the founder of the public relations giant Hill and Knowlton, had just walked into his office on the thirty fifth floor of the Empire State Building. When he got an emergency call from Tommy Ross, who handled public relations for the American Tobacco Company, Public Relations was a new and still small business at midcentury. Hill and Ross sought each other's advice and met occasionally at watering holes in midtown Manhattan. So Hill wasn't really talking to a competitor on the morning of December 14th, 1953. Ross painted a startling picture at this moment, he said. The chief executives of six of the seven major tobacco companies are in a suite at the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street, trying to figure out how to stave off the collapse of their industry. It has started two weeks earlier with the release of a sensational study by a scientist at the Sloan Kettering Institute that found cigaret tar produced cancerous lesions in mice. The latest in a series of ominous findings over the previous four years, strongly linking cigaret smoking with lung cancer. And just six days before Ross is cool on December 8th, Dr. Alton Ochsner, a thoracic surgeon and pioneer, a lung cancer researcher, gave a speech in New York in which he said that quote the male population of the United States will be decimated unless some steps are taken to remove the cancer producing factors from cigarets close quote. Tobacco stocks dropped four points after decades of continuous growth. Cigaret sales began a steep decline.

[00:08:49] Hill met with those panicked executives in their suite at the Plaza the next morning. Later, he wrote in his autobiography Quote, After being admitted to their suite, I found the tobacco man sitting there looking mighty glum. I thought, Here is a group of men who consider themselves good upright citizens being held up before the country as killers who came up with a genius strategy to help them. The tobacco execs wanted him to deliver a Pro cigaret campaign that would discredit the recent studies. But Hill advised them that that wasn't enough. They also needed to fund new scientific research that would contradict the studies connecting smoking to cancer. This was a much bigger project than just running a PR campaign and a new tactic for an industry on the edge of a public opinion precipice. The exact said OK, and a few weeks later, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, TIRC was born.

[00:09:51] Now, fake experts weren't new. We know this. Even fake research institutes existed before John W. Hill. You Might remember the Bureau of Railroad Economics from episode one created by Massacre Re Brander and train nerd Ivy Lee all the way back in 1890. But John Hill was going to take fake expertize to a whole new level. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee never claimed to be independent, but their research was taken seriously even by the most legit journalists of the day. Edward R. Murrow himself When I first heard this story, I was not shocked exactly because it's the sort of thing that you still kind of see today, but surprised that it happened way back then into Murrow himself. So I called up Mary Annaise Heglar, a writer and my frequent partner in podcasting.

[00:10:46] The long standing idea in science, and it's still very much the case today, is that if you are good at communicating, you must be bad at science,

[00:10:59] and I will never understand the logic of that. No matter how many times you tell me that story is never going to make any kind of sense.

[00:11:07] It doesn't right? really. It really doesn't. But anyway, it's very much a thing in the scientific field. So on top of the fact that they're training these scientists to be very good speakers. They also know that that the scientists on the other side are are not going to be getting this training and they're probably going to be bad at communicating the science that they're doing.

[00:11:31] right, they're playing chess and we're over here playing Tic TAC Toe.

[00:11:36] So in 1955, Edward R. Murrow, who's like a very well-regarded journalist, there's a radio award named after him. All this stuff, he has this.

[00:11:48] Yes, he has this TV show where he does, you know, it's like very, you know, he's like tackling the hard hitting news of the day, all that kind of stuff. And so he decides to do a two part series on this new research about smoking and cancer. And he has on all of these like, you know, logit, all the researchers who have been doing the work showing the link between cigarets and cancer. And then he has on a bunch of people from the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and the tobacco guys again, like all, are very spoken. Murrow, like, like, spent more time talking to the tobacco funded researchers, in part because, like the interview was going better. Right? This is really key to understanding the genius of science denial, both the bias toward people who are media trained, who do a good job of presenting their case, their story, their point of view to the media. That bias is still very entrenched, particularly on TV and radio, but then also the bias against being good at those things. If you're a scientist, which is a really big problem when the public needs to understand science and a very easy thing for industry to weaponize.

[00:13:14] Here's Dan Zegart with more of the tobacco story.

[00:13:18] And the industry had gone out way out on a limb and said that it was not. It was not only going to be vigilant, but if it found something that was in cigarets that cause cancer, it would, you know, it would halt, stop everything and take very dramatic action and make sure that it was removed. So that was the standard that they had set themselves. But the thing was that when Murrow went out and did it and went out, and actually he had very little to do with finding the he himself who was, you know, probably the preeminent. A figure at that point in television journalism had very little to do with actually picking the people who were interviewed, the scientists who were interviewed were mostly picked by Fred Friendly, who is his producer. These were eminent people. These were Elmer Hess, who was the president of the American Medical Association. It was W. C. Hooper who was an important figure at the National Cancer Institute. It was Dr. Paul Coton who was an environmental cancer specialist out in Los Angeles. And all of these guys were in one way or another, compromised by the industry. They had taken there, either they were already on the payroll or, in the case of Coton, were actually members of the Tobacco Industry Research Council, which was this front group they had set up.

[00:14:33] Here's a snippet from the two part series Murrow did about cigarets and cancer on his show. Seeing Now in 1955,

[00:14:43] filter tips represented less than two percent of the total in 1952. In 1955, more than 20 percent are filter tips, and the figure is rising. There is a clear indication that the relationship between cigarets and Health has caused this change. The cigaret industry aware of this fact and fully cognizant of its responsibility, has organized the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. Its scientific director is the eminent cancer investigator, Dr. Clarence Cooke, little head of the Jackson Memorial Laboratory at Bar Harbor, Maine. Dr Little, have any cancer causing agents been identified and cigarets. No, none. Whatever, either in cigarets or in any product of smoking as such. This is interesting in a way because there are many known cancer forming substances in time. It is interesting that certain of the published data seem to show an association between certain types of cancer, but perhaps cancer in general and excessive use of cigarets. Now, we're very interested in finding out what kind of people are heavy smokers and what kind are not. Not everybody is a smoker. Not everybody who smokes is equal a heavy smoker. And what determines these selections on the part of people? Is it a different nervous type of person that smokes a great deal? Is it a person who is reacting differently to a strain of stress because it is very clear that certain people just can't take it as well as others?

[00:16:38] I mean, if you can separate yourself from from like how awful it is, it's very smart. It's like like this guy is being asked, is there any correlation between smoking and cancer? And then he kind of goes like, Well, you know, what about the other causes of cancer? Certain types of people who are very anxious types of people might not handle cigarets as well as other types of people. That's diabolical. Yeah. Dan Zegart again.

[00:17:13] But if you look a little deeper, you found was every single one of these guys was had it essentially either been been bought and paid for and was on the staff or was about to be and those relationships were not disclosed fully. Some of the people were not on yet actually working for the Turk, but they were about to be or they were already had a relationship and were carefully selected by the industry to be put forward. The point here is that, you know, these were eminent people and actually when Fred friendly got a call from one of the tobacco guys and they asked him, Well, how is it going? How's your program going with Murrow? And he said it's going pretty well, but if anything, I think it's going to make. It's going to make the tobacco industry look better than these scientists because your people are better at explaining their more definite. And of course, this is what it's possible to be more definite when you are really espousing a particular point of view and you were paid mouthpiece. Yeah. And that's the great advantage that these guys have always had this particular wing of the scientific community.

[00:18:25] The tobacco industry scientists weren't just definitive because they had an opinion. They also had the benefit of Hill and Knowlton Media Training

[00:18:34] Hill and Noel and put these people through their paces, particularly Clarence, Dr Clarence Cooke, little who they spent weeks and weeks with, getting him ready and talking to him and just trying to understand how he was going to come off. As time went on, the industry got even better at grooming people and went to great lengths to woo scientists to get them to do a research project for them.

[00:19:01] This strategy worked great for decades.

[00:19:05] The result of this whole campaign by tobacco was that it was completely effective. They found as they looked, there is a great deal material on this, in the tobacco files, in the documents that are found that you can find that were produced in the lawsuits where they go back and they say there's very, very little in the way of interest now in smoking in health. This is 18 months after the tobacco broadcast by Murrow. So they it's amazing because this is a very small group of people, a few scientists, some public relations, public relations firm, you know, and a handful of companies. And they completely change the public dialog about the most pressing health concern, probably of the 20th century, which was smoking the pandemic. And that's not an exaggeration of smoking related illnesses millions of people a year worldwide.

[00:20:01] There are a couple things to pay attention to in this story about how well the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and Murrow. The first is that while this tactic is generally referred to as science denial, it's also misdirection. The tobacco industry folks did deny certain scientific facts. Or at least cast doubt on them. But what really made this multi-decade campaign work was the way they obscured the link between cigarets and cancer by flooding the public sphere with studies on all the other causes of cancer. This is the story of PR, not comic books, but after the break, we're going to meet one of the self-described supervillains of this story. By day, a sort of average conservative public relations guy, but under the cover of darkness, Dr. Evil. More on him after the break. Another big figure in tobacco lobbying is the infamous PR guy, Richard Berman. He's so notorious that 60 Minutes once dubbed him Dr. Evil. And today he actually uses that to sell himself in proposals. Although I'm not sure where that Ph.D. is from. Can you get funding to do a doctorate in evil? I think I'm just going to call him Mr. Evil until he can produce his degree. Just plain old dick evil. Richard Berman was once described as a quote Despicable man, an exploiter, a scoundrel, a world historical motherfucking son of a bitch by his son, the late David Berman. Music fans might know that name. He was a poet and the lead singer of the band Silver Jews, but he and his father did not get along. Richard Berman was just to evil. Here he is, speaking to a roomful of fracking executives about how to keep the anti-fracking folks at bay.

[00:22:11] Yes, you played in people's minds a time. They don't know who's right and you win all ties because the tide basically ensures the status quo. People are not prepared to get aggressive in moving one way or the other. So we all take a tie any day if I'm trying to preserve the status quo.

[00:22:29] This tape was recorded by someone in the audience who subsequently leaked it to the New York Times, so it's pretty hard to hear. But what Berman is saying there is he'll take a tie any day if he's trying to preserve the status quo. In other words, these tactics don't have to win. They don't have to convince the public to like fracking. They just have to tie because people who aren't sure about an issue won't campaign for change and the status quo carries on. That's the goal with campaigns like the ones Berman does and also like the one hell cooked up for Big Tobacco. They don't need to convince people that smoking is good for them, or even not bad. They just need to confuse the issue enough to stop any big changes. Maybe smoking's bad. Maybe it's fine. The science sure seems confusing. In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general released a report that backed up the research Dahl and Weiner and others had done for decades.

[00:23:34] This book, containing 387 carefully worded pages, is a federal government report. Its title Smoking and Health, a report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. It was released at noon today, and it says in view of the continuing and mounting evidence from many sources, it is the judgment of the committee that cigaret smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.

[00:24:03] It still took another six years for the government to ban cigaret ads on TV and radio, and 25 years after that for a series of lawsuits to reveal the truth about all the research tobacco companies had suppressed, particularly with respect to how addictive nicotine was, how much they knew about that addictiveness, and how much they used that information to hook people on their product. When those lawsuits went to trial, many of the same scientists who had been trained to speak to the media turned up as witnesses. Hill and Knowlton had picked them for that very reason,

[00:24:41] being very canny assessments of this person's personality, how they would play and therefore developed a stable of people who not only would speak for, let's say, the press, but would also testify before Congress and appear in in trials as lawsuits began to be filed. These became there, litigation ready experts, and they were really formidable. They won, obviously, because they won every case that was ever filed against them until 1996. That's a pretty good record. That's for 42 years. That's a pretty good record.

[00:25:17] That brings us to another key part of this story. And this show, a lot of people think public relations just means media relations, getting stories in the papers, securing interviews for company exacts that kind of thing. But the people and tactics that we're talking about go way beyond that. Public relations guys like John W. Hill or Ivy Lee or Edward Bernays, they would call people who only deal with the media side of things. Press agents. And they would do it with a certain level of disdain for them. Public relations meant literally dealing with the public or really several publics. There was the general public. And then there's also legislators there, another public, another audience to be convinced, confused or calmed by these arguments. Businesspeople were a public women, youth, mothers, employees. In the case of Tobacco, Hill and Knowlton worked to improve the general public's view of the industry, but also to ingratiate the industry within the scientific community and with legislators. When the science makes your product look really bad because you know it causes cancer or creates superbugs or sets the ocean on fire. You need a strategy to distract people from all that. Hill's approach to science, denial and distraction has been used by multiple industries in the decades since Big Tobacco had its day in court. Climate change is an obvious example. The fossil fuel industry suppresses information, hires experts and spokespeople to cast doubt on climate science. Misdirects attention toward other causes of the problem. And even highlights the benefits of CO2.

[00:26:58] The scientific evidence remains

[00:27:02] as to whether human activities affect the global climate CO2.

[00:27:06] OK, this is gas of life, so if they want to tell you their CO2 is dangerous, you tell them to stop reading, right?

[00:27:15] We are changing the conversation about climate and carbon dioxide, a mild warming gas and a powerful plant food. We know the benefits of CO2. Food can be grown where it wasn't ground before. It has increased crop harvest by a third. Farmers pump it into their greenhouses to produce more food for your family. NASA's satellites tell the story CO2 has greenes the globe in the last 100 years.

[00:27:43] All of those people you just heard are funded by the fossil fuel industry. The chemical industry uses this tactic often to. Here's how a few industry spokespeople talked about the recent finding connecting glyphosate to cancer. Glyphosate is a key ingredient in the popular weed killer roundup.

[00:28:04] It will do no harm. No, it is not. Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.

[00:28:08] We do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing increases in cancer. You can drink a whole

[00:28:14] quart of it, and it won't hurt you. If you want to drink some, we have some here. I'd be happy to actually. Not, not really. But not really. I know it wouldn't hurt me. Roundup and glyphosate products are vital to farmers around the world and not only large scale farmers, but also vital to smallholder farmers.

[00:28:33] As a scientist is very disappointing seeing all of this misinformation

[00:28:38] about glyphosate online because it is scaring people. Misinformation is beginning to dominate the space, and I'm

[00:28:44] very concerned about the consequences that this will have for agriculture. Several pro-business groups use this tactic recently to create confusion around COVID 19.

[00:28:58] You cannot escape God, not even with the mask or six feet.

[00:29:02] He's blowing the lid off the COVID scandal. The scam, demick. We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. This cycle that we're doing is not stopping anything. It's not preventing the spread. Locking down doesn't work. Here's my evidence. I get a lot of positive calls about it.

[00:29:20] When Mary and I talked to ProPublica health reporter Caroline Chen earlier this year about covering COVID, she said she never had to deal with this tactic on her beat before COVID hit.

[00:29:33] I think that that was something that caught a lot of health journalists by surprise because we were, I think you were used to maybe debating over whether or not high level there should be single payer versus private insurance. You like that kind of you know where you could see people line up in their tents. But. Both sides, I think more traditionally would have reasons for those, and then all of a sudden during the pandemic, I think things like masks but so politicized that I felt like I completely severed from any notion of we want to see what the evidence is here.

[00:30:13] Any time science interferes with profits, it seems this technique shows up. Here's how to spot it. It redirects your attention, pointing to all the other causes of the problem while denying that this one product plays any role at all. It obscures the funding sources of all the studies that point out those other drivers of the problem. It suggests doubt, rather than any particular conclusion. Remember, a tie is a win. The goal is confusion and thus inaction. It goes after the scientists themselves with ad hominem and personal attacks. And as with all fake experts, the overarching message is that you shouldn't worry about whatever problem they're discussing with the powers that be. Have it under control. Remember, the point of these campaigns is to make the science too confusing, to convince you that you have to understand all the details of the science to be able to make a reasonable decision or even have an opinion, and that you're really better off just leaving it to the experts to figure out in the words of Dr. Evil, a tie because a tie is a win when you're trying to maintain the status quo. That's it for this episode next week. A fun story. Why you have PR to thank for Downton Abbey. Thanks for joining us on this little tour of the dark corners of the PR laboratory. Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to check out all the many horrors these twisted geniuses unleashed on the world. Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production. Lots of documents, photos, videos and other fun facts about the wild world of PR are on our website. Rigged Dot Media. Our producer is Martin's Alz artwork. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Braun. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project. Big thanks to Mariana's Hagler, who you'll hear throughout this season. If you want to hear more of me and Mary joking around. Check out Hatake, the show we do about climate change. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress and Vanderbilt University. The show is reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep3 Transcription

The tactic of science denial is fairly well known these days. In this episode, we dig into a lesser-known aspect: the PR strategy behind science denial, and the origins and architects of that strategy.

John Hill: The Right-Hand Man

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Daniel Edelman: The Psy-Opps King

Herb Schmertz: The Bully

Ivy Lee: The Godfather

Edward Bernays: The Freudian Slip

E. Bruce Harrison: The Godfather of Greenwashing

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

To understand the current state of disinformation in the U.S., it helps to know the history of how and why the PR industry was created. 

In response to a protest, the country’s largest oil company sent in private security teams, who wound up killing several protestors, including women and children. The company’s spokesperson claimed the protestors were hired by a labor union trying to stir up trouble.

Sounds like it could have been written about any of a half dozen recent pipeline protests, right? But these are the basic details of a mining strike in 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado. The mine was owned by Standard Oil, and the Rockefeller family had only a few years prior been raked over 
the coals by a messy antitrust lawsuit and a series of 

 about their monopoly on the country’s burgeoning oil industry.

They needed help burnishing their image, so they called on another industry that was just emerging at the time: Public relations. Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the first modern PR guy, came up with that idea that the protestors were 

 Today we would call them “crisis actors” and it’s an accusation thrown at almost every protest, but few people know the whole thing was created
 by a PR guy working for an oil company back in 1914.

Lee invented all sorts of other tricks of the trade too. 

 for a start. Before Lee, companies had a pretty adversarial relationship with the press and vice versa. Lee thought businesses would do better to tell journalists more of their story themselves. It was so unusual that when he first began sending press releases to The New York Times, the paper printed them verbatim. On behalf of rail, coal, oil and tobacco clients Lee also created seemingly independent information bureaus, like the 

, whose experts were regularly quoted criticizing railroad tax proposals.

Again, this was more than 100 years ago. And Lee was followed by generation after generation of PR experts, each adding another bell or whistle to America’s disinformation machine—some on behalf of oil, others on behalf of the chemical or tobacco industries, often on behalf 
of all three at the same time.

For years, the story about disinformation has been that Big Tobacco created it all and then Big Oil copied them. And there's a thread of truth there. Some of the same phony scientists who sold America on the idea that smoking was safe turned around and told them not to worry about climate change. But it’s not the whole story. To get that, we need to look at the context that enabled climate denial to flourish, an information system polluted by 100 years of propaganda. And we need to look at who was hiring those phony scientists—not companies, but PR firms. When people focus on one particular form of science denial, or on one technique that this or that industry copied from another, this is the big picture they miss: the disinformation machine driving everything from QAnon conspiracies to climate denial, vaccine hesitation to white nationalism. It’s bigger than any one industry, but it was built on behalf of all of them, and if we want to have any hope of addressing the large, intersecting, complex problems facing us today, it must be better understood. And then reconfigured, or dismantled altogether.

Just as Ivy Lee was building the modern PR industry, the U.S. government realized it needed a bit of propaganda to help sell American citizens on World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had made staying out of the war a key part of his campaign, and now he needed to convince Americans that it was a good idea to join in...without looking like a hypocrite. He tapped George Creel, a journalist turned political campaigner who had helped with Wilson's electoral bid, to build out what was eventually called the Committee on Public Information and generally referred to as The Creel Committee or the Creel Commission. Creel tapped some of the nation's greatest journalists (Ida Tarbell, for one!), filmmakers, artists, and publicity men to create a 360-degree assault on the 
American public. They made films, created compelling posters, and even launched the world's first "influencers." In cities and towns across the country, Creel and his team found influential members of society and trained them to give 4-minute pro-war speeches before screenings of 
silent films or big events. They were known as the "4-Minute Men".

Several members of the Creel Committee went on to be major influences on the burgeoning PR industry. One of them was a young publicity agent from the theater, Edward Bernays. Bernays had done some creative promotion of plays with particular social missions and had worked for major ballet companies as well, and his work caught the eye of Creel. It didn't hurt that Bernays's uncle was Sigmund Freud—on both sides, in a bizarre and some might say Freudian twist (Edward's mother was Freud’s sister, and Freud was also married to Bernays’ father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human impulses that drive behavior. While Ivy Lee was 

 part of the Creel Committee, he handled publicity for the American Red Cross during the war effort, and he and Bernays worked together often through their respective positions. Bernays became a trusted colleague of Lee's during the war, the only other PR guy that Lee thought his equal. It was after WWI that Bernays famously said, “If propaganda could be used so effectively in war, why could we not use it in peace?”

At the time, democracy was still a relatively new idea, and those in power were almost universally terrified of it. Propaganda—which Bernays later 

 because “the Germans had given it a bad name”—was created as a reaction to growing public criticism of the titans of industry who had once been hailed as heroes. But it was also created to provide those in power with the tools to manipulate the masses. Bernays, Lee, and 

—Adolf Hitler—were all close readers of French philosopher Gustav Le Bon, who posited that the public, or as Le Bon put it 

 could only be both satisfied and safe when it was controlled. Like Le Bon, Bernays had a real disdain for the public, writing in his seminal book 

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

To be clear, Bernays saw himself as part of that “ruling power,” and he relished the role of manipulator.

Ivy Lee died fairly young, in his 50s, and when he did Edward Bernays inherited many of his clients, including both 

the fossil fuel industry trade group that Lee had helped Standard Oil create as World War I was ending. While Ivy Lee largely focused on shaping and controlling the way the media got information as a way to mold public opinion, Bernays tried to manipulate the masses more directly. His best known trick was obliterating the taboo against women smoking in about six months, a 

They tasked Bernays with increasing sales, and he actually went to a psychoanalyst to talk about what cigarettes signified. You guessed it, phalluses. This got Bernays thinking about the “penis envy” women supposedly feel and an emergent push for women’s rights, and boom he had it: he would make smoking a women’s empowerment issue. He convinced a few young women he knew to stage a smoking “protest” in New York, calling cigarettes “freedom torches,” then alerted the press to the protest. It made headlines across the country and within a few months women all over the country were smoking and American Tobacco’s sales were soaring.

So, to recap, PR emerged as a way for industry to deal with a three-pronged threat: the rise of investigative journalism and activism shining a light on the misdeeds of industry, the emergence of regulation (which previously left industry to its own devices), and the expansion of the vote to members of society that had little in common with captains of industry. It was wildly successful. The first wave of PR effectively put a stop to the muckrakers’ early calls for corporate accountability.

Then the Depression hit and once again America’s bosses were the bad guys. Publicists like John W. Hill helped companies like 

paint labor unions, social security, and the New Deal as socialist. Hill paid commentators like 

 to write op-eds in newspapers and magazines, or join panel discussions 

 ginning up fear about these ideas. (At one point, Hill’s firm Hill & Knowlton was paying Sokolsky $40,000 a year to write pieces criticizing Social Security and the New Deal—that's a high six-figure salary in today's dollars). Hill would go on to mastermind the 

 (TIRC), a hub of science denial around smoking...that sounds an awful lot like the research bureaus Ivy Lee had set up some 40 years before. Not a huge shock given that Hill idolized Lee.

Hill’s client roster also included the 

 during those years, so it's no surprise that you see the same tactics deployed by TIRC then used by oil companies to combat rising concern over "the greenhouse effect" or by agribusiness to combat rising concern over GMOs. In fact Hill would have folks from the tobacco companies and chemical companies join the API, because he spotted ways for all three industries to work together—to lobby together for or against regulation, to trade strategies and ideas, even to create new products together. Without PR firms bringing them together, these industries and companies 
may have tended to stay in their own worlds, but the type of cross-pollination Hill enabled was hugely influential.

In fact it’s how the cigarette filter came about.

Cigarette filters are one of the reasons oil and gas companies were named defendants in the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. “When tobacco companies needed to assess the toxics in their cigarettes and in cigarette smoke, the people they turned to to do it were the oil companies,” says Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Oil companies had been testing exhaust and refinery smoke for years because of the Clean Air Act, so they were the ones that had the sophisticated equipment and the knowledge to test for toxins in cigarette smoke.

“And when the oil companies reported back to the tobacco companies on the toxins they were in fact finding in that smoke, you know, what did they do with the information?" Muffett said. "Did they go public and say there's a massive risk here? No. They entered into joint enterprises, joint ventures with the tobacco companies to produce cigarette filters.”

Since the inception of the PR industry, its most expert practitioners have deployed a handful of techniques on behalf of multiple industries and really in service of all industry: to paint business as a good faith member of the community, to sway public opinion, to avoid what infamous PR guy Rick Berman calls "public judgement," and to create political will in their favor. But they weren't operating in a vacuum. In deploying these techniques on behalf of industry, they fundamentally shifted the information ecosystem in America.

Today, it's not just industries that want to avoid regulation or deal with a crisis who use PR techniques, it's everyone from your local county government to your favorite musician to the most 
earnest nonprofit. It's the filter through which all information flows to the public. Which doesn't 

 to be a bad thing, but it has certainly led to the information pollution we have in the U.S. today, where trust in journalists and experts is at an all-time low, the public is tremendously confused, people can (and do) just consume "news" that tracks with their opinions, and so on. To clean up that pollution, it helps to know how to spot these techniques. Our hope with this investigation and related podcasts and documents is to help people do just that—not to make people even more suspicious of everything they see, or double down on getting their information only from one trusted YouTuber, but to pull the mask off a bit and help people find their way through the filters to the information they need to make important decisions about their lives.

E. Bruce Harrison Documents

John Hill Documents

Ivy Lee Documents

Newsom Documents

Edelman Documents

Schmertz Documents

Bernays Documents

S9, Ep2 | A Legal Strategy

S3, Bonus: We Interrupt This Podcast for New Research + Emily Atkin and Guardian CEO Anna Bateson on Banning Fossil Fuel Ads

S3, Ep9 | Jay Rosen and Nicholas Johnson on What the Media Can Do About Disinformation

S3, Ep7 | John Hill and the Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle

S3, Ep8 | Meet The Harrisons

S9, Ep1 | The Panic

S3, Ep6 | Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future—Edward Bernays and W. Howard Chase

S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

S3, Ep5 | Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech

S1, Ep2 | Ye Olde Crisis Actor Myth

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

S3, Ep4 | Oil Slick, Part 1—The Rise of the Corporate Persona

S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

S1, Ep1 | Fake Experts and Real Bacon

S3, Ep3 | Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection

S3, Ep2 | The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle

S1, Ep3 | A Tie Is a Win

S3, Ep1 | The Father of Public Relations

S1, Ep3 | Weaponizing False Equivalence

S9, Ep3 | The Next Citizens United Will Be a Climate Case

Martin Zaltz-Austwick

[00:00:00] Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm. Hmm. Hmm, hmm. Hmm. Hmm hmm. Hmm. Hmm hmm. Most of these theater is brought to you by mobile reading the fuel the public television around.

[00:00:18] Masterpiece Theater has been bringing British dramas and occasionally comedies to Americans via PBS for more than 50 years now. It's one of the longest running shows in American television history. The show is still basking in the glory of its most recent hit Downton Abbey, but there were plenty of others before it, like Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of the 70s. Also about how class works in Britain. Because, you know, as Americans, we like to pretend class isn't a thing here. At this point, Masterpiece Theater has become an institution. But by all accounts, it might never have happened at all without one publicist who saw the show's potential-- not for exposing Americans to British culture, but for polishing the image of the giant oil company he worked for. That man's name was Herb Schmitz, and he's something of a legend in the PR world, but today we're going to focus on just one of his major contributions to the world of spin. Welcome back to Rigged the Story of Disinformation, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and television right here on U.S. soil. Today's trick? Sponsored content. SponCon!

[00:01:39] Shaw, and I think he visited at least 20 or 25 different corporations, but he finally found an entree at mobile.

[00:01:49] This is Henry Becton, a producer at WGBH in Boston. When Masterpiece Theater first got going, he's talking on the Making Masterpiece podcast here about Stanford Calderwood, the president of WGBH and one of the creators of Masterpiece Theater.

[00:02:07] So he got an interview with Herb Schmitz, and Herb liked the idea.

[00:02:13] Herb Schmertz was the VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil at the time, the company's top PR guy in his book Goodbye to the Low Profile. Schmitz tells the story behind Masterpiece, and you can catch a few glimpses of his personality in this story. As Schmitz tells it, Calderwood called him up one day in 1970 and asked him if he'd been watching the Foresight Saga, a BBC miniseries that had been running on PBS. And Schwartz writes in his book Now in those Days, and I suppose the same holds true today. Even those people who didn't watch serious drama on public television would say that they did so, although I had never seen a single episode. I assured Stan Calderwood that the Foresight Saga was one of my favorite shows. Calderwood was asking $10000 an hour to sponsor Masterpiece, an incredible deal for mobile. And Schwartz didn't know that Calderwood had already called up several other companies first looking for sponsorship. It probably wouldn't have mattered, because for Schmidt's masterpiece wasn't just a good deal. It would also deliver a key benefit to mobile. Here's WGBH producer Rebecca Eaton explaining why on the Making Masterpiece podcast.

[00:03:35] Herb Schmertz was a very smart guy who understood marketing instinctively, and he understood that a high class British drama series on public television was exactly what his oil company needed because his oil company needed its name to be burnished. They wanted to be the classy oil company. Not so much to sell gas at the local pump, but in Washington to impress the policymakers, the movers and shakers.

[00:04:09] Herb Schmertz might sound like the name of a beige suit wearing insurance salesman who has one line in an episode of Columbo, but Herb was anything but beige. He was a blond haired, blue eyed, clean shaven, flashy suit wearing ladies, man. Picture Mad Men, but for PR. Don Draper, but blonde. He had a toughness about him earned during a decade or so as a labor lawyer before he held court in a corner office at mobile headquarters. Herb Schmertz had actually made headlines for settling big labor disputes like the nationwide dockworkers strike in 1964. He had worked on political campaigns too and been an adviser to JFK. In fact, he was tapped by all the Kennedys to work on all of their campaigns, and he brought these experiences into his PR work for mobile. Later in his life, he would describe his work for Mobil as an ongoing political campaign, but for ideas instead of a man. Even people who hated Schmertz would begrudgingly admit he was incredible at his job, whether it was bullying the media into covering Mobil's point of view or using cultural institutions to turn Mobil into the thinking man's oil company. He would later talk about this as influencing the influencers or influencing the influential. And it was the driving force behind a lot of Mobil funded content.

[00:05:43] Masterpiece Theater is made possible by a grant from Mobil Corp., which invites you to join with them in supporting your local public television station. Coming soon from Mobil Masterpiece Theater, a very unusual television event. About a very unusual group of people in a very unusual place. Mystery introduces its latest detective a familiar face in a new role, the woman who caught the Bombay poisoner and the blackmailer Belgrave Square and modest winning combination

[00:06:18] PBS had just launched itself in 1970 and in 1971, Masterpiece Theater launched with mobile attached. The company had actually already dabbled in some public TB funding, with donations to Sesame Street, Big Oil and Big Bird the perfect pairing. But Mobil went even bigger on Masterpiece Theater, and it was just the beginning for shipments. Within a few years, he had added mystery. Another British show on PBS this time focused on, you guessed it, crime dramas. And then there were the nature documentaries. Americans who have enjoyed the dulcet tones of David Attenborough narrating the animal kingdom for decades might be surprised to learn that it was mobile oil that first brought Attenborough's nature documentaries to the states. Schmitz also launched another show called Mobile Showcase on commercial TV. Less highbrow content could play in mobile showcase and smarts later explained that it gave him a way to get mobile backed content onto commercial channels, content and ads that just weren't allowed on PBS. Things like this

[00:07:33] because I am the foreigner in another man's country. Every time I look in the mirror, I say, Who is that? Yeah, I told Vern Porter he didn't have to look over his shoulder at anybody because he's given it everything he's got every day. Verne Porter and other mobile people working around the world to find and produce oil strive to build deeper understanding between our culture and others. Watch for another mobile showcase presentation titled 10 Who Dared? Anthony Quinn is your host every week.

[00:08:06] Publicly, Schmertz and PBS always insisted that Mobile had no editorial power over what Masterpiece Theater showed. But in an interview for a book about masterpiece later in his life, Schmertz was in the mood to spill some tea. I found the notes from that conversation deep in a university archive in Baltimore, and it was eye opening. Here's how Schmertz describes bringing the show Upstairs. Downstairs masterpieces biggest hit last century to the US.

[00:08:39] "I just said that mobile is going to buy this show, and if you people don't want to run, it will find other ways to distribute it. They said. We were trying to pressure, we're trying to build booths or we're trying to dictate to them. We didn't try to dictate anything. I just said, we're going to take the decision that this is a show the American public should see and will enjoy now. They characterize that in negative terms, threats and everything else. But I merely said that I could syndicate this with public television stations around the country without PBS GBH, which I'm sure we could. That's just a practical statement of the truth.

[00:09:16] I'm not threatening you and merely reminding you that you are replaceable.

[00:09:24] When I found this interview, it was so surprising to hear him lay it all out like this that I had to call up my friend and partner in crime writer Mary Annaise Heglar, because she knows I've been fascinated by this master for a while. Mary, I'm calling you to tell you about one of my all time favorites in the PR world. I know you've heard me talk about him before. A guy named Herbert Schmertz.

[00:09:51] The Schmertzster! My boy Herb. So he sees this masterpiece theater thing is like a cool opportunity. And he was actually one of the last calls they made. Everybody thought that it was boring. Everybody was like, Why are you bringing British cinema to the U.S.? Americans don't like that stuff. And then Herb is like. This is going to make us look a little posh. Posh, which means fancy, fancy, Ray, like British slang for fancy. Yes, and so OK. Anyway, so he he does it and it starts to become more and more successful, and he starts to really fancy himself a film producer like for Real. So he starts making these regular trips to London, and he's meeting with all these different production companies. And he within like five years or so from the point where mobile from that point to like mobile stop sponsoring masterpiece, which is like another 20 years, he becomes one of the most important men in British cinema. Because if you want your show or your film to get to America, you basically have to impress Herb.

[00:10:59] It's completely wild to me that an oil company exec became one of the most important people in TV and film in the 1970s.

[00:11:08] But his influence didn't stop with Masterpiece Theater. It reached PBS 60 Minutes, Ted Koppel. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even more more on the many tentacles of Herbert Smith's after this. We heard before the break about Herb Schwartz's multipronged propaganda parade to persuade the public that mobile oil was the classiest gas guzzler in town. Now keep in mind that around the same time, Mobil jumped on board with Masterpiece Theater. Schmitz had pioneered another form of sponsored content. The advertorial In 1970, the New York Times opened up its op ed pages to advertisers for the very first time. Schmitz saw this as a golden opportunity, and rather than run ads in those pages, he hired writers to pen mobile funded op ads. They were clearly marked as ads, but they read like all the other op ads, and they were juicy with headlines like If

[00:12:15] we tell you oil companies don't make enough profit, you'll have effect. Oil companies don't make enough profit. Sorry.

[00:12:24] Well, Herb would have loved a clickbait headline at work. Surely, the American people wouldn't be swayed by a British accent and some clickbait headlines, right? Well, yes, yes, they were. Herb Schwartz's campaign of culture washing was highly successful, about 10 years after Mobile started sponsoring Masterpiece. They surveyed upscale college grads and found that Mobile had a surprising amount of cred with this group of people. They didn't necessarily agree with Mobil's views, but as experts put it, they knew who we were. 31 percent said they bought mobile gas more often than other brands. In his book, Schmitz wrote, Our

[00:13:08] pollster was so surprised by the numbers that he wrote in the margin mobile must be the thinking man's

[00:13:15] gasoline. The thinking man's gasoline makes about as much sense as the intellectuals weedkiller or the philosophers toothpaste. But Herb Schwartz had pulled off making mobile seem kind of classy and in mobile marketing reports about the impact of those New York Times editorials. The company saw major dividends Kert Davies from the watchdog group. The Climate Investigation Center dug up one of these reports from 1982.

[00:13:43] They talk about having influence the New York Times editorial viewpoints in the document says quote. Our analysis shows that the Times has altered or significantly softened its viewpoints on conservation, moving from a total reliance on conservation to advocating increased production incentives to solve the supply shortage on offshore drilling. Moving from valuing environmental concerns at the expense of exploration and development. To urging accelerated offshore drilling and on gas. A haul which is another name for ethanol moving from increased subsidies for gas oil production from grain to arguing against such subsidies. So they tallying how they have affected the viewpoints of the New York Times on conservation, monopoly and divestiture, decontrol, natural gas, coal, offshore drilling and gas are all things that they had written op eds on.

[00:14:37] Sometimes the advertorials and the highbrow TV converged like the tame PBS ran a British docu drama on Saudi Arabia called The Death of a Princess. It was not flattering to Saudi who were furious about this film and the impact of that anger and Saudi's withdrawal of petrodollars was felt around the world. Mobil, of course, had a long history of business with the Saudi Arabians, and they did not want to jeopardize that relationship. So they placed an advertorial in the New York Times calling on PBS to pull the show. And then Schmitz even appeared on the show Open Mind in 1980 to attack the film himself.

[00:15:23] But my guest today is Herbert Schmitz Mobile's Public Affairs, Public Relations Government Relations vice president, who has never hesitated to raise any number of strong and strongly critical points about many aspects of the media, both public and private firm. Thanks for joining me today. Great pleasure to be here, Dick. I want to turn as quickly as possible to a new fairy tale, the mobile ad or op ed piece or editorial. Call it what you will have to call them pamphlets, pamphlets, but they appear in newspapers. Before we spoke about the accepted version was that this was an accurate portrayal of life in Saudi Arabia. I think after we spoke out, another spoke out. It was quite clear that this was a fiction. I have the feeling that this was that this had a measure of political polemic and it also well, that, of course, is what people were saying about your ad, a new fairy tale. Well, I mean, would that be fair? No, I don't think so.

[00:16:23] A new fairy tale was the title of the op ed that mobile had run in the New York Times, criticizing the film and chastising PBS for running it.

[00:16:33] Our ad was done for two purposes one to have the public know that if they did watch it, that it was a fiction and not another factual documentary. Secondly, to to try to urge that perhaps there be some other balancing type of programing which could occur in the one hour panel after the show. Now those were the kinds of things that that clearly helped to put the show in context. But at the end, your conclusion. In the end, we hope that the management of the Public Broadcasting Service will review its decision to run this film. Meaning you hope they wouldn't run it or at least review it and exercise responsible judgment in the light of what is in the best interest of the United States.

[00:17:20] And there you have it another benefit of Spon Khan control and access. Sheamus didn't just have that page in the New York Times that he paid for every week or the ability to tell PBS, which shows to run in masterpiece. Theater for a period of time, he seemed to have most of the media cowed when 60 Minutes turned its lens on itself to question whether it always did the right thing journalistically. Herb Schmitz was there to tell them where he thought they went wrong. Oh, great. A guy who's spent his life manipulating arts and culture to make oil companies look good, lecturing the country on journalistic ethics. This should be good.

[00:18:03] The real issue is, do you always exercise the maximum amount of your rights? And I think the public's perception of me is that you're more interested in exercising your rights to get somebody than you are and exercising the rights to inform.

[00:18:17] Ah yes, Herb Schmitz, VP of Mobile, but also a stand in for the public and really the guy who knows what sort of information the people really want from journalists. It wasn't just 60 Minutes, either. When Ted Koppel wanted to talk about whether a batch of libel suits corporations had brought against journalists constituted an attack on the First Amendment. Her experts was there to say No, not at all.

[00:18:44] Is it an effort at intimidation or just an attempt to keep an increasingly powerful news media accountable? We'll talk with a leading media critic, Mobil Oil Vice President Herbert Schwartz, and with New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis.

[00:18:59] This was a nightly news show positioning Herb Schmitz, VP of Mobile Oil, as an equally valid cultural critic as a New York Times columnist. That's the sort of position that Schmitz had carved out for himself as much as a lot of the media complained about his treatment of them. Something about it worked. It struck a nerve, and it had the effect of getting journalists to overcorrect and buy into what Herb was selling that his and Mobil's opinions were just as valuable to the public as any public intellectuals. Herb even went up against The Wall Street Journal, hardly a hotbed of Trotsky ism. Even back then, in its press, Rupert Murdoch days when the paper refused to bend to his will. Schmitz went on TV to blast him for

[00:19:48] its mobile oil, the nation's third largest industrial corporation. Against The Wall Street Journal, the world's most influential business newspaper this week, the tension that normally exists between an aggressive newspaper and a hard nosed corporation erupted into open warfare. The catalyst was an article in The Wall Street Journal about a mobile real estate project in Chicago. The Journal said this woman's husband will get part of the profits. He's Percy Pine. The fourth, and his father in law is Raleigh Warner Jr., who is chairman of the board of Mobil Oil. This week, Mobile canceled its advertising, with the Journal worth more than half a million dollars a year and imposed a news boycott. No press releases and no interviews. Herb Shimmered says the Journal has been attacking mobile unfairly for years. They have received documents that have been stolen from the company. They are the most widespread user of unnamed sources. They seem to be interested mostly in gossip and innuendo, derogatory comments from unnamed sources and it's been a five year history of this is accusations are false and very self-serving. What he sees is a cheerleading kind of news coverage that presents a picture of mobile that he would like to present to the world. So it's a stalemate.

[00:21:06] After that, he wouldn't give them earnings reports. Press releases, nothing. Herb Schmitz was nothing, if not Petty. Schwartz was a scourge of journalists in the 80s. But in 1988, he left mobile and returned to his first love. TV and film My favorite little personal tidbit about smarts is that when he left mobile, his big plan was to create his own film and TV production company because by this point, she was so convinced that the reason that all these producers wanted to talk to him was that he's actually good at it and that they appreciated his creative input like he really got involved. What shows they would run? He was in charge of the casting. He picked a lot of the shows he signed off on like artwork for the posters now. So he was like a little mogul. Yeah, yeah, a mobile mogul. So shot in his mind, he thought, Well, I've been a producer for like the last 10, 15 years, so I'm going to go off and do this job, you know? And then it's like, you totally see. As soon as mobile stops paying for anything, he has like no more production credits. It's like, no, dude, they really were just after the oil money. It was not your creative. I'm sorry.

[00:22:25] So he went from masterpiece to two-piece.

[00:22:27] Yes, that's right. That's right. Oh, so Herb Schwartz did not have a life in the public eye after mobile. But the trick he pioneered. Sponsored content. It sure did. Today, the New York Times doesn't just let companies write op ads. They have a whole internal brand studio that creates campaigns and writes pieces for companies. ExxonMobil hired them a couple of years back to create a comprehensive campaign around the company's investments in algae fuels. These vibrant green dots microscopic living organisms are algae. Look closely. Algae grows almost everywhere from murky pond. In other episodes, we've talked about how to spot various techniques. Sponsored content is a little different. It's relatively easy to spot, although it can sometimes blend in. But most publications clearly market. What a lot of people miss, though, is how and why it's effective. Because on the face of it, it seems harmless. Clearly marked and people aren't that easy to influence, surely. But in general, companies don't tend to spend millions of dollars on stuff that isn't effective. They don't buy into communication strategies that don't work. So let's take a look at why this one is still going strong. First, it wraps your messages and the credibility of another brand. When Exxon goes to the New York Times tea brand studio, for example, it's not because the Tea Brand Studio has hired the best creatives in the business. Sorry to break it to you. It's because of exactly what they market on the brand studio's website. Their connection to The New York Times, no matter how well it's marked when a story about Exxon's amazing algae program turns up on the New York Times homepage, that lends a certain amount of credibility. And that's what companies are buying. It furthers the idea that companies are people and that their ideas are worth listening to, that their opinions should be part of the mix. Public discussion. Companies don't give to art museums and music festivals or sponsor shows on public media to be good corporate citizens. They do it, as experts put it, in more than one talk about Mobile's philanthropic efforts for the bottom line payout and to maintain what's called a social license to operate this invisible permission slip that the public gives to industries and companies to let them keep doing what they're doing. Are you really going to support policies that harm the company that sponsors your favorite TV show or the music festival you go to every summer? Maybe. But it's going to take a lot to get you to turn against the company that brought Lizzo to Jazz Fest. Yeah, that's a real thing. Shell's sponsors Jazz Fest now and Lizzo's come in in 2020 to. That's it for this time next week. We're going to dig into astroturfing, the creation of fake grassroots groups to push business friendly messaging with a look at one of the most hilarious examples of it. Maybe ever come back for that. Thank you for joining us backstage for a behind the scenes look at the history of public relations. Remember to subscribe or ever to get your podcast, take this ride all the way to the end. Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production, lots of documents, photos, videos and other fun facts about the wild world of PR are on our website at Rigged Dot Media. Our producer is Martin Alz Bostwick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Braun. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project. Big thanks to Mary and a heckler who you'll hear throughout this series. If you want to hear more of me and Mary joking around. Check out Hot Take. The show we do about climate change archival tape in this episode is courtesy of C-SPAN, Vanderbilt University, the University of Maryland and the Library of Congress. The show is reported by me. Amy Westervelt, thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep4 Transcription

The legendary Herb Schmertz, VP of Mobil Oil, worked with PBS and The New York Times to invent sponsored content—sponcon—back in the 1960s.

Rigged Season 1

In Rigged, we rummage through the bag of tricks used by PR to shape the world you live in. Over the last century, these tricks have rigged the media, the government… society, really...with sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes profoundly serious effects on our democracy. This is a podcast about that war for hearts and minds right here on US soil.

S1, Ep3 | A Tie Is a Win

About This Episode

Transcript

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S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

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